Since January 2025, New York State has prohibited hotels with more than 50 rooms from offering shampoo and other personal-care products in plastic bottles under 12 ounces, and smaller hotels follow in 2026 (Hotels magazine). Refillable wall dispensers are one way to comply. Meanwhile Notpla, a London company that makes packaging from seaweed and plants, lists a water-soluble bath oil sachet among its prototypes (Notpla). The brief for SeaChange was an amenity that meets the law without giving up one of the small luxuries of a hotel stay: something made just for the guest.

SeaChange is a concept amenity line for New York hotels, built on Notpla’s water-soluble sachet. Each amenity is a single sachet that dissolves in the bath or shower. The name and tagline come from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” That’s what happens to the sachet, and it’s the brief for the identity: deep-water colours, gilt and verdigris, and the ritual of turndown rather than the language of sustainability. Notpla’s bath oil sachet is still a prototype, and the shampoo and body wash sachets are my extension of it. This is speculative work, not commissioned by or affiliated with Notpla.